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Michael Sharwood Smith Award 2023

On behalf of the SLR Editorial team, we are pleased to announce the winner of the third biennial Michael Sharwood Smith Award for the best article published in Second Language Research. The pool of scholarly work considered for the award comprises all articles that have appeared in the previous two volumes of the journal (volumes 37 and 38), including full-length research or keynote articles, research notes, review articles, and discussion and commentary. 

The award recognizes Founding Editor and current Editor Emeritus Michael Sharwood Smith for his 30 years of leadership of Second Language Research and his contributions to the field of second language acquisition. Its author will be awarded a prize of £100 in the form of books from the Sage catalogue and a one-year online subscription to SLR. 

The Editors of SLR and members of the Editorial Board served as referees.  In selecting the winner, they considered the salience of the research questions an article poses; the sophistication, rigor, and innovation of the research methods employed; and the significance of the article’s implications for theory formation.

Winners of the 2023 MSS Award

It is our pleasure to announce that the winner of the 2023 Michael Sharwood Smith Award is the keynote article:

Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition by Marit Westergaard
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0267658319884116

Westergaard’s keynote article will be available to read free of charge for one year. We congratulate the winning article’s author and express our deep gratitude to the Editorial team and the Editorial Board panel who refereed this competition.

Previous Winners of the MSS Award

2020 Edition

Lexical accent perception in highly-proficient L2 Japanese learners: The roles of language-specific experience and domain-general resources
Seth J Goss, Katsuo Tamaoka
Second Language Research, vol. 35, 3

2019 Edition

Phrase frequency, proficiency and grammaticality interact in non-native processing: Implications for theories of SLA
Kailen Shantz
Second Language Research, vol. 33, 1

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